Posts
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| An obese Goeth shoots starving Jews |
Your book about the Holocaust has arrived--thank you. I can't imagine a man making his career writing about senseless brutality, but it's good from a historical standpoint that he does. While browsing genealogy books at the public library recently, I saw one entitled My Grandfather Would Have Shot Me. The grandfather in question was Amon Goetz (the camp commandant of Schindler's List fame), and the granddaughter was half black, so she might very well have been right about him shooting her. I had given no thought to the impact of notorious Nazis on their descendants, so I found the one-third of the book that I read interesting in that regard, yet I can't recommend it because I didn't like or respect its author.
I don't know how I lost her, but I once had a German blog friend who grew up in post-war Germany, and who described the men of her father's generation as sullen and angry. Indeed, what could they say except that they fought on the side of evil and lost? Given the misery they brought to the world, the depression of their descendants matters little to me. I can understand why those descendants feel as they do, but since millions upon millions of people were murdered by their fathers and grandfathers, I'll reserve my sympathy for others. The older I get and the better I understand suffering, the more compassion I have for the victims and the less for the perpetrators. Psychopaths who hunger for power--men like Putin, Trump, Kim Jong-un, and al-Assad--bring nothing but needless pain to the earth, and for what, so they can feel powerful during their few short decades of life? If I could, I would shoot them down for the mad dogs that they are, not that a quick death would be adequate justice.
I
know that in writing as I do, I must also sound heartless, but is it
not true that to have sympathy for evil people makes one a party to
their crimes? What I have written also comes from my intense dislike of
Jennifer Teegue, the author of the book I mentioned. I considered her
narcissistic, a woman who could put on a good show of sympathy but who
was devoid of any real feelings for anyone but herself. She wondered in
the book whether there was an inheritable aspect to being the descendant
of someone like Goetz, and I thought that, well, given that I see you
and your maternal ascendants as being unable to feel the pain of anyone but yourselves, maybe there is.
As
for the genealogy, I've been neglecting other things for it. It seems
that the further I go back in time, the less interest I have, what with
the number of grandparents doubling with every generation. Once I got to
32-great-great-greats, the names started running together even while,
once I got to the almost useless censuses of 1840 and earlier, my
ability to learn about their lives decreased. I have learned much,
though. For instance, Peggy and I come from a long line of rural people,
and while I knew that rural families, at least, used to be big, I had
no idea how big. It's not even unusual to find people with ten kids,
and, given the high childhood mortality, that's not counting the many
who were born and died between censuses. I was also surprised to learn
that nearly all of the ancestors I studied lived in but two counties in
Mississippi (on my mother's side) and two counties in the Appalachian
Mountains of Alabama (on my father's side). I should think that if, on
my mother's side, I visited Choctaw or Attala County, Mississippi (or,
my father's side, Dekalb or Jackson County, Alabama) every third white
person would be my cousin, yet I didn't know this until the last few
weeks.
I also noted that most of my ancestors were dead before my age of 68, that
nearly all of them listed their occupations as "farming" or, in the
case of the women, "keeping house." Few were well-educated, and most
were barely literate. Some people on my side--and on Peggy's side--had a
few slaves, but not enough to make them rich (some slaveholders owned
hundreds of slaves). With this knowledge comes the will to believe that,
if my ancestors did it, it surely couldn't have been that bad (which is
how the descendants of Nazis think). I know this is silly, but that's
the feeling. I also found that I had several relatives who fought on the
side of the South during America's Civil War, and I was more appalled
by their willingness to fight to preserve slavery as by their actual
owning of slaves because I can't imagine the defense of slavery as a
justification for the loss of 600,000 lives (the Civil War is still the
costliest in America's history.) When I was a boy, Southerners still
held "Yankees" in contempt (the South referred to
the Civil War as "The War of Northern Aggression"), but I gather that Southern contempt
is now based more on religion and politics than geography.
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| Alcoa Transport, Sunk Oct 2, 1942 |
One
of the treats of my study has been finding photos of long dead
relatives and World War I draft registration cards that listed my
ancestor's physical characteristics and contained their often childlike
signatures. I also found my father's war records and a photo of one of the two merchant ships that he was on (the SS Alcoa Transport) and were sunk by U-boats. Six men died on that ship, and I so wish my father were
here to talk to because I would love to know that if the Alcoa Transport
was the ship he told me about on which men died for a cargo of Pabst
Blue Ribbon. Unfortunately for me, World War II draft records have yet
to be released, as have censuses since 1940, which means that recent
history becomes harder to trace than earlier history, at least on the
more reputable genealogical sites.
The
reason I started studying Peggy's genealogy is that her father is still
alive. For her part, Peggy cares much less about such things than I,
although she was moved when I found the original custom's record of her
family's 1959 return from Spain (where her father was stationed in the
Air Force) on a truly beautiful Lockheed plane called a Super
Constellation. Yesterday, her father told us that, while over the ocean,
he looked out the window to see that one of the props had been
feathered, but that he kept this information from Peggy's mother, who was morbidly afraid to fly. That's the kind of information that one could never learn without living relatives.
I'm
sure I told you that my DNA study indicated that my ancestors were
nearly all British and Irish, and that have no American Indian blood (I had
thought I was at least 3/16), but a higher than average amount of
Neanderthal blood and a little West African blood. I'm happy about my
Neanderthal ancestors, but simply puzzled about the black ones (it
sounds like rape to me, but then that could be true of my Neanderthal
ancestors as well). It's a hell of world, and then we die.
